There’s that Goth kid episode of South Park where Stan’s girlfriend dumps him so he decides to be goth and he asks the goth kids how to be a non-conformist like them and they say, Just dress like we dress, talk like we talk, act like we act, and listen to the music we listen to.
I feel that way about killing myself sometimes when I’m thinking about how even if it’s for the most noble of reasons, it’s hard to take much pride in suicide.
But if life is only pain, Stan asks the Goth kids, then what’s the point of living?
To make life more miserable for the conformists.
If only I could buy into that kind of adolescent middle-finger rebellion, except that adolescent middle-finger rebellion is mostly counterproductive to my innate self-hate of wanting to remove yourself from the world to stop making so many conformists miserable all the time.
And yet here we all are with our guns and nooses and pills and razor blades and bottles of Drano and our tickets to the top of the Empire State Building, our flippers and swim trunks for the depths of the San Francisco Bay below the Golden Gate Bridge.
And our self-serious solipsistic poses, our ambiguous tweets, our ghosting of every text chain someone else's signed us up for.
Suicides in threes, suicide in contagion.
That’s how we find our friends.
In suicide pacts.
More often in death.
The local news articles they write to warn parents to talk to their children about their love of Kurt Cobain and Trent Reznor.
How do I become one of those cool kids? we ask.
You just die like we die, die like we die, die like we die die die.
Says Sylvia Plath, says Virginia Wolf, says John Kennedy Toole, says Breece D’J Pancake, says David Foster Wallace.
So conformist, so sad, so cliche.
In the book What Narcissism Means to Me, Tony Hoagland writes:
I know there are some people out there / who think I am supposed to end up / in a room by myself with a gun and a bottle full of hate, / a locked door and my slack mouth open. / But I hate those people back / and the hatred makes me strong / and my survival is their failure.
I only wish I could generate that kind of sincere hate.
Then again, in the same book, he also writes, But now I am afraid I know too much to kill myself / And I am too knowledgeable now to hurt people imprecisely
He wrote that book when he was 49.
Died of cancer at 65.
I’m going on 46 now.
Which one of those options would you choose?
I only know which one I wouldn’t and which one I haven’t yet.
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